Last weekend, I put my finger on the element of the Agent Carter series that was sticking out to me. I didn't mind that the guys were sexist creeps. I didn't mind that the society was sexist. But it occurs to me that Agent Carter, who grew up in that environment is bothered by it, as if she had a 21st-Century sensibility about the whole thing. When she gets the assignment to get lunch orders, why does that irritate her?

I thought this was a common theme of the post-war era. During the war, women had taken on more and more positions of importance. When the war was over and the guys returned home, those women were suddenly pushed back out in the cold and expected to just go back to the way things had always been.

You're finally being taken serious, and suddenly you're back at taking lunch orders. I totally get why that would be "irritating" (to put it mildly).

Jackson can probably eke out another trilogy from the story of how Legolas loses weight between the events of THE HOBBIT and LotR.

He could probably also do a movie (or a trilogy!) on the wacky adventures that Bilbo and Gandalf clearly gets up to on their trip back to the Shire.

As for the actual movie. That was, uhm, certainly a lot of fighting. Bard is pretty cool. Legolas is as lame as ever.

Spoiler:

I was kinda disappointed how Tauriel's main purpose was apparently "be plot device for Legolas antics". I'd have liked her to do just one thing that Legolas didn't swoop in and take over (other than cry over Kili which is, like, the one scene she gets where Legolas doesn't come in and go "move over, I got this.")

If only Kili had fallen in love with Legolas instead of Tauriel, he'd still be alive!

I'm not trying to be obtuse, here, but ... I didn't get that at all watching the film—not for an instant.

I didn't get that from the movie either, but I did see interviews with Ridley Scott that suggested that the Engineers being mad about Jesus was the point.

From the actual movie, it doesn't make much sense. But then again, neither does Shaw's conclusion that they stopped communicating with earth 2000 years ago. Unless, of course, it's reasonable to assume that she can know with 100% certainty that no other references than the cave paintings she has already found can exist on Earth.

Personally, I think it's pretty wacko to conclude that "hey, we've found five cave paintings now. Yeep, that's all of them."

The Engineers could literally still be on Earth (and, of course, considering that they have the same DNA as humans, they are), and Shaw would have no idea.

(And don't get me started on how a scientist can take the realization that "hey, they have the same DNA as humans!" and reach the conclusion "...so they must have created us" instead of "so they are us.")

But of course, Shaw turns out to be completely right in every baseless theory she comes up with, it's like she read the script or something!

Ask yourself this - whatever the robot's goals were, was infecting his crew members with the black goo the best way to achieve them? If not, why did he do it?

Because Charlie was being a complete jerk to him half a second before. David probably shouldn't be able to hold a grudge, but that's totally the motivation I got from him.

It's actually one of the few scenes of the movie I don't have much issue with.

I have a lot more issues with how Holloway is being all moody and whiny over the spectacular failure the mission has already been, what with them only finding evidence of alien civilization, recovered an actual alien body (that his girlfriend the Super Scientist set fire to, admittedly) and all sorts of amazing alien technology, all within a few hours of landing on a moon in a distant part of the universe.

I think this sort of harassment varies a lot from place to place. And so does the underlying "attitude" behind it. Entirely anecdotal, I rarely if ever experience anything like this when I'm out and about in Copenhagen, while it was a near constant when I lived in Rome.

I've been places where it felt super uncomfortable (Prague comes to mind), and places where it never got further than "kinda funny" (such as aforementioned Rome).

I spent two weeks in New York earlier in the year, and I'd rate it somewhat at the middle of the scale. There were a few incidents, but nothing particular creepy.

Who, by the by, is behind one of the most anticlimactic "surprise twists" in the history of the movie industry. :p

"SURPRISE! I lied about being dead!" (uh, okay. Why did we care that you came along in the first place?)

"And also I want to ask the Engineers vaguely different questions than Shaw. Talk about classic surprise twist!" (Uhm, okay, this still does't explain why you couldn't just have been aboard the ship like a normal person. Though I suppose at least it explains why the medical-whatsit machine is spontaneously misogynistic.)

Got a Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS for ELITE: DANGEROUS and was pleasantly surprised to discover it works with X-WING straight out of the box, no problem and auto keymaps a mostly sensible set of controls onto the stick.

That's the one I got!

I feel like such a dork, using it, but it does make flight surprisingly pleasant (especially E:D, kb+m is kind of a nightmare in comparison).

Suspending my disbelief: Shaw clearly has 3-4 doctoral degrees. She's an archaeologist, astrophysicists and biologists, plus probably one or two more. That's hard to believe, but it's easier having her involved in all primary scenes than to have multiple mouth pieces for the plot. Suspension of disbelief.

AND she likes to base her scientific findings on nothing, and then support her unfounded theories with the deeply scientific argument that "it's what I choose to believe." :p

Also, you definitely don't need guns on scientific expeditions. Even for scientific expeditions on foreign worlds where no one has ever been and that you have no idea whether is home to a species of indigenous space bears.

Lord Snow wrote:

The bottom line is that it doesn't feel like the movie is aware of just how dumb what just happened is.

Exactly this. There's a big difference between a movie of people doing dumb things, and a movie that doesn't seem to realize the people are doing dumb things.

Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Skill proficiency is valuable and not easy to come by, so I'm not even sure I'd consider it a fair trade. :)

If you want to look at it mechanically, the shield proficiency makes up about a third of the Medium Armored feat (the other two being +1 stat and medium armor proficiency) while the skilled feat gives three skills (I think?). So that seems pretty even.

In practice, you have two monsters per page, so when you select monsters for a campaign, you also add in just as many monsters you don't want. Also, since these come from different "books", the alphabetical order won't work either. Then, once you have your setting compendium, the rest of the monsters become a dead weight, because you are not going to be able to make a second such setting without the ogres, ankhegs and xorn you already added to the first setting. Even if you decide to break up your setting collection, you have some serious sorting work to do.

And, you know, the pages deteriorate pretty quickly once you start using them.

I'm a kook, so I always just wrote down the monster statblocks in my campaign documents. Voila, instant make-it-yourself binder that easily copies from campaign to campaign. No sense cutting up your monster manual for that.

I think Pratchett has a problem with his own writing. I mean, he clearly favours the 'little guy'. The protagonist is almost always a "normal" guy, preferably a little dumb. But by the end of the story they win, they come out on top, and they turn into the sort of successful character (well, unless you're Rincewind) that Pratchett doesn't seem to enjoy writing about.

That's why, I think, that the Discworld series doesn't have a lot recurring protagonists*. Previous protagonists become a part of the established cast, sure, but usually as part of 'the establishment'.

*) I know there are a exceptions, but even a clear favourite like Sam Vimes is mostly relegated to background character, when he's involved at all.

I find it odd, since I use the same "do what makes sense to you" approach when adjudicating pathfinder (and I think that's what the PF rules say to do) yet the rules forum seems to eschew that approach in favour of semantics and pseudo-legal analysis (I'm not using that in a negative way),

I think one of the issues is that 3e, and by extension Pathfinder, are very complex games, rule-wise, and even a small spur-of-the-moment ruling can have some pretty far reaching consequences. 5e, at least at this point, seems less prone to "unexpected consequences".

Well, I suppose they could have stayed true to the Dice Gods and let the random roll chart decide. 'OK, so the iconic fighter is a gay dark skinned Kobold. And the wizard is a trans ogre. This...may take some illustrating.'

It gets even more silly when you don't even have a governmental issued ID card in the first place.

Like I recently bought a new cellphone online. This was no problem, and a few days later the cellphone and a new simcard as delivered at my house. Unfortunately, the simcard hadn't been pre-activated, and the automatic activation service didn't work (or maybe I was too blonde to understand how to make it work). Either way. New simcard didn't work.

So I go to the store of the original retailer and go "hi, this new simcard doesn't work, can you activate it for me." And he's like "Sure. Do you have any ID?"

Me: "Uh. I don't think so? I have a... library card?"

Him: "It has to be a driver's license or a valid passport."

Me: "I don't have a driver's license, and - and this might come as a shock - I usually don't carry my passport around with me. Besides, I'm pretty sure it's expired."

Him: "Then I can't help you."

So I still don't have my new phone because I refuse to pay a passport renewal fee (which is, like, $200) and wait two weeks just to get a simcard manually activated.

*hrmph*

I mean, I get why this policy exists, it just gets really dumb when there's no surrounding infrastructure (ie. a national id policy) to support it. Anyway. this thread is really more about racism than ID policies, so I apologize for the derail. But it felt good to get it out! :)

(And honestly, who wouldn't rent a carpet cleaner to a wolf? I mean, c'mon!)

So I'm wondering how much combat initiative is enough. My guys all have between 12 and 14 initiative (and it took some hard choices to get it that high), and they never get to act first. A usual fight goes something like:

1) I set up at maximum range from the enemy, spreading out my team as much as possible. In cover if available.
2) My sniper takes a shot. Usually kills the target.
3) Every enemy on the map runs into melee.
4) My guys get to act.
5) *sigh*

Also, maybe I missed it but is there any way to, like, prepare your guys for combat? It's impossible to set up an ambush or anything when you can't prepare and always lose initiative. It's like everyone in the group gets super surprised when my sniper takes that first shot. They should know her better than that by now!

No, it's not. That's what some people have made it about, and what Zoe "Drama" Quinn would like to turn everyone's attention to, but that's not what it's about.

It's about journalistic integrity, or lack thereof. Quinn was the catalyst in bring an issue that has existed for a long damn time to light.

If that was actually true, why is Zoe Quinn being the subject of all this hate? Why drag Anita Sarkeesian into it? Why is no one calling Nathan Grayson's mom and yelling "YOUR SON IS A WHORE"? (disclaimer: you shouldn't, but these are things that happens to Zoe right now.)

None of the "breaches" of "journalistic integrity" that sparked gamergate actually happened.

Should we have a discussion about the very close and probably very unhealthy relationship between gaming websites and game publishers? Sure. That would both be interesting and appropriate. But that's simply not what gamergate is about, and anyone trying to have a serious discussion under the '#gamergate' banner are hard to take serious. That tag comes with a lot of unbelievably vile baggage.

Frankly, that so many people here apparently supports that level of harassment has pretty much put me off these forums. Because ew.

And why does she even drag up Zoe Quinn? I understand that you can have a disagreement with Anita's point of view (calling it an attempt to destroy gamer culture is maybe a little strong). She has opinions that you can disagree with, at least. Zoe... probably has viewpoints, but it's not like she's made a point of telling anyone about them. She just kinda exist and apparently get tagged with "well, she's also a woman and everyone hates her for some reason, so she probably wants to see the video game industry die."

Uh. That's not the disgusting trend that is being exposed here. The disgusting trend being exposed is how a vocal minority (hopefully) will latch onto anything to spread disgusting lies and lash out at women, while hiding behind weak claims of "journalistic integrity".

I wish the Bad Apps* website still existed. It had some truly marvelous examples of horrendous backstories.

This was compiled by a guy who was a GM on GarouMUSH and it was, truth be told, kinda mean. But also hilarious in what people were trying to get by the application process.

My favourite, I think, was the guy who was part of a secret organization and had authority to call in nuclear strikes but obviously wouldn't use that authority because that might be overpowered and he was a cool guy like that.

Man I wish that site still existed.

*) This was at a time where App was short for application. Well. I guess it still is. But the non-software kind of application!

The worst are the German translations as they always tries to translate it, but sometimes make big mistakes (e.g. 1 mile = 1 km)

Pet peeve alert!

It honestly bothers me more when the translation is super exact. Like when someone goes "oh, it's about two miles that way" and it gets translated to "oh, it's about 3.219km that way". I hate that so much. :)